


Who Does the Wolf Love?

by executrix



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-22
Updated: 2014-02-22
Packaged: 2018-01-13 09:41:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1221508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/executrix/pseuds/executrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for emuna, who asked for Jarvik/Servalan, where Jarvik survived and returned to Servalan, causing a struggle between passion and her need to stay independent.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Who Does the Wolf Love?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [emuna](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=emuna).



> Flashbacks in italics. Julia Roberts echo intentional.

MENENIUS: _Pray you, who does the wolf love?_  
SICINIUS: _The lamb._ (Coriolanus, Act 2, Scene 1)

ANGELUS: _She made me feel like a human being. That’s not the kind of thing you just forgive._ (Buffy the Vampire Slayer 2.14, “Innocence”)

The reporter bounced with excitement, teetering on her four-inch heels. (She thought it was worth the waiting list—and a week’s pay—because the shoes were licensed as an exact copy of a pair that the Supreme Empress once wore.) “I’m your biggest fan!” she said. 

“Oh, I doubt that very much,” Servalan said.

“Sorry, sorry, ma’am…I am your humblest fan.”

Delaryne Kho motioned to her camera operator, for a 360 degree shot of the Empress’ new look: a somber purple velvet gown. Not a brilliant royal purple, but something darker, grayer, stormier. The gown reached the floor, and had a low, square neck and long, tight sleeves with a slight puff at the shoulder. What looked like a woven-in design was actually rich embroidery in matted bronze thread. The Supreme Empress wore absolutely no jewelry at all except for a thin gold chain around her neck and a wafer-thin pave diamond band in her hair. 

“Let’s get on with it, then,” Servalan said. “Considering that I am solely responsible for the welfare of the entire galaxy, I haven’t much time to waste.” 

“Ma’am,” Tal Jothun, the camera operator, said. “Our shot list begins with a visit to your personal quarters. Is that acceptable?” A mutoid pressed a button, and the floor of the corridor began to move from the office to the Royal Suite.

Kho began the voiceover. “We are privileged today to see the Supreme Empress at home. Everyone in the Federation knows the public side of the woman who, despite her youth and beauty…” (the Federated Broadcasting System knew which side its bread was buttered on) “nevertheless has achieved total political and military control.” 

A trim robot, clad in a black dress and saucy frilled apron and cap, opened the door. Jothun, thrilled to have this scoop, took panoramic, floor-to-ceiling shots of the suite.

Servalan pushed open the sliding door to one of her wardrobes. It glittered, like an icebox in serious need of defrosting, with white satin and chiffon and velvet and wool. She lifted out ensembles at random, holding them against the velvet of her current dress, and twirling around for the camera. 

The last one she lifted out had a high neck and back. “That one’s very different, Your Majesty,” Kho said. “Yes,” Servalan said, with a smile that terrified Kho. 

_After the Liberator got away, Ven tempted her away to a remote Agricultural World for a brief holiday. She discovered that what the sun on your naked back gets you is sunburn. She had to have three new gowns made up._

“Here,” Servalan said, pushing one of them at the trembling journo. “Take it. It’s yours.”

_Sometimes Servalan enjoyed reading pre-Atomic history. What would be the point of controlling the flow of information, if you couldn’t read all the things that you denied the common people? Her favorite subject was Queens of Antiquity. Unfortunately, there were few enough of them to make it an easy subject to master._

_She sat in a very comfortable chair, reading sad stories of the death of queens. Some of them had been deposed. Some of them died in childbirth—a fate that could probably be averted with modern medical care. Some of them had lost their heads, literally, to angry mobs. If you weren’t careful, you’d find yourself carried in on a litter on Monday, carried out with the litter on Tuesday._

_Even more of them lost their heads and took on consorts who, formally or informally, promoted themselves to equality with their queens, or even supplanted them. And in this hollow ring…_

Servalan lifted the (rather long) chain to show its pendant: a very small ring set with something that glittered feebly. (She had rounded up all the office clerks who had the effrontery to get engaged, and confiscated the tiniest and ugliest ring she could find.) 

“ I will tell you a secret,” she said, whispering to the gallery. “A man gave this to me,” Servalan said. “A very great man. I loved him. But I realize now I am wedded to my Empire. Private happiness, such as you simple people enjoy, is not to be my lot.”

_”This is special,” Ven said. He belched Belhangrian ale. “Me and you. You’re not just a roll in the hay. We should get married. You need a husband, babies. A real life.”_

“He promised me that he could capture the Liberator with just three pursuit ships,” Servalan said. “And” (she thought, for some definitions of “capture”; he didn’t promise to keep the Liberator) “that is what he did. He was my hero. His name was Ven Jarvik.” 

She cleared her throat, and spoke in a more normal tone. “Here,” she said, handing a datacube to Kho, whose arms swam through the satin of the dress Servalan had pressed on her, trying to find a place to put it. “There’s some footage of my beloved. All that I have left of him.”   
_At first, she was so happy, so very happy, when he returned unscathed from the Liberator mission. Then she was horrified by the depth of her fear for his safety. How could she accumulate the wealth and power she needed unless she was free from that sort of baggage?_

_For a time, she was impressed by his courage. Everyone else around her was a coward, bowing and scraping and telling her just what they thought she wanted to hear. Ven was fearless, telling her that it was about time someone put her in her place._

“And here I am now,” Servalan said, sweeping her arms around the suite, “Right where I belong! Oh, look, here’s a very old image…how funny that I should still have it to show to you!” She widened her eyes, pumping against the weight of mascara, waiting to see how Kho would handle that one. 

“Why, ma’am, it might have been taken yesterday,” Kho said. “Already beautiful, and hopeful that the day…that this day…would arrive when you could bring the entire empire under your benevolent sway.”

Servalan smirked back at her, thinking that the girl would go far, although considering the locations of Ursa Prime and Cygnus Alpha that wasn’t always an advantage.

_The girl in the picture wore the black leather of a Second Lieutenant in Space Command (tailored even tighter by one of her mother’s serfs), her light-brown hair grown to the very limit permitted by regulation, noticeably longer than cropped black Imperial locks._

_In Year Nine chemistry class, one of the girls asked the Science Mistress why yoghourt kept for such a long time in the chiller. Miss Hockbourgh said that it was already yoghourt, what else could happen to it? a statement arresting enough for Servalan not only to look up from the magazine she was reading under the desk but to remember it for long years._

_She certainly remembered it during her posting at the Transit Depot. Being a guard meant that you had to pay at least a bit of attention to what your prisoners were doing. What they were doing was muttering to each other, in the big holding cell where they were kept pending transport to exile. They were Cultists, and whoever could remember a bit of their Book would say it over and over, and anyone in earshot would repeat it, over and over. You could tell them to shut up, but often they wouldn’t, and you couldn’t make them. You could only kill them as a last resort, because they took it as a personal favor._

_So of course Servalan couldn’t help overhearing what they said, they said it often enough to be burned into her memory. Some of those stories were jolly interesting. There was one about a King Day Void, for example. The girl he fancied was married, so instead of inventing Divorce he just kept putting the girl’s husband on the front line until one day he could catch the widow on the rebound._

“And this is the only surviving image of me and my darling Ven…a few years later. Here! You can see your Empress when she was just a girl, looking at a boy, asking him to love her.” 

_He called her “Cleo,” said that she was a seductive goddess, the sexiest woman he had ever met. Servalan found this irritating. That went without saying. Anyway, what did it matter how thrilling he found her? He was a man, and more than that, a soldier, and you had to lock up the livestock around them._

_And if it was more agreeable, in bed with someone who wanted his own pleasure than with someone who was terrified not to produce enough of hers, so what? Tools are not toys._

_Then the evil day came when Servalan opened up the enameled silver bonbonniere on her desk, and unthinkingly closed it when she saw that it was nearly empty, nothing left but one walnut praline (Ven’s favorite). If she weren’t careful, the day would come when all that was left in the dish was one pistachio truffle, and she would give it to him, and then where would she be?_

“The following year, he earned the Nine Planets Rhomboid,” Servalan said. Kho bowed her head, and Jothun whipped off his beret (a difficult operation for those holding a video camera), because they knew it was a decoration only awarded posthumously.

Servalan led the broadcast team back to the more public rooms of the Palace: the Venus Ballroom, the Del-10 Ballroom for more intimate receptions, the Throne Room where diplomats were received, the Tourmaline Banqueting Hall, and the Octagonal Office and its spherical mirrored chandeliers. The guards searched Kho and Jothun, reassuring themselves that they had not misappropriated anything, and escorted them onto the lawn so Servalan could pose on the balcony.

Years after the fact, Servalan’s security analysts discovered what really happened on Kairos. When she read the reports, she concluded it was a time of midsummer madness, when everyone could be duped into shrinking away from trifles, believing that they were immense and terrifying. A real Sopron was carried away from Kairos and deployed against Servalan, but there were figurative ones all around.

Servalan spent so much time with mirrors. The problem was that eventually she assumed that what she saw in them was accurate. Jarvik was just as selfish and perpetually lustful as she was, so she thought he was her counterpart, her other half. He had walked away from a respectable position in the Federation, so she thought he was humble and would never pose a threat to her. Then she realized that even Achilles had a tiny area of vulnerability, where anything, anybody, could be a threat.

Those Cultists got it wrong, of course, which is why they were now bones in lime pits and she was now the Supreme Empress. The story they told each other was about sending someone into battle over and over again, until he didn’t come back, so the sender could get married. 

Jarvik was sent on gaudier and more desperate missions, until he didn’t come back. Servalan could remain on her own. And travel faster. And now she was on the throne, which proved that she was right.

**Author's Note:**

>  _Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size._ (Virginia Woolf, “A Room of One’s Own”)


End file.
